The election of the sixth Labour-led government heralds a new direction for climate change policy in New Zealand. As part of the new government’s 100-day priority plan, it pledged to set a target of carbon neutrality by 2050 and to establish the mechanisms to phase out fossil fuels.

Remember the movie “Moneyball”? The Oakland A’s are struggling, financially and on the baseball field.Then they introduce an innovative system for figuring out which players will improve team performance.

Written by Siddharth Narayan and Michael Beck, University of California, Santa Cruz | Print | Email

A 12-year “hurricane drought” during which no major hurricanes formed in the Atlantic ended dramatically in 2017. The devastating impacts of Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria across the United States and the Caribbean provide tragic reminders of the catastrophic risks we face on our coasts.

Written by Neal Hughes, Australian National University | Print | Email

2016-17 has been a great year for Australian farmers, with record production, exports and profits. These records have been driven largely by good weather, in particular a wet winter in 2016, which led to exceptional yields for major crops

Written by Jeremy Bird, International Water Management Institute | Print | Email

African nations have overwhelmingly included climate resilient agriculture in their indicative pledges to the United Nations. And agriculture is seen as a major focus through a common position of the African Union on climate adaptation.

Written by Thomas Bateman and Kieran O'Connor, University of Virginia | Print | Email

Conversations about climate change often derail into arguments about whether global warming exists, whether climate change is already happening, the extent to which human activity is a cause and which beliefs are based in evidence versus propaganda.

Educating rural communities can help them prevent permanent damage to the environment. There is a common misconception that you can’t talk about climate change in rural communities because the issue is considered too polarizing...

Written by Karen Vella, Queensland University of Technology and William Butler, Florida State University | Print | Email

With every passing year, Southeast Florida faces more pressure to adapt to climate change. The region already experiences the effects of climate change, such as flooding on sunny days during the highest tides of the year

Ecosystems are already showing the signs of climate change, from the recent death of mangrove forests in northern Australia, to the decline in birds in eastern Australia, to the inability of mountain ash forests to recover from frequent fires.

Water crises seem to be everywhere. In Flint, the water might kill us. In Syria, the worst drought in hundreds of years is exacerbating civil war. But plenty of dried-out places aren’t in conflict. For all the hoopla, even California hasn’t run out of water.

Written by Stephen Whitfield and Julian Ramirez-Villegas, University of Leeds | Print | Email

In a context of unprecedented climate change and food insecurity, adaptation in agricultural systems is critical in Africa. It is crucial to breed new varieties of staple crops that are adapted to deal with climatic conditions.

Written by Sybil Sharvelle, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University | Print | Email

Many regions of the United States are struggling with water shortages. Large areas of the West are contending with moderate to severe drought, while California is now in the fifth year of one of the most extreme droughts in its history. Even non-arid regions, such as the Southeast, are not exempt from water shortages.

California has experienced, over the past few years, its most severe drought on record. In response to worsening conditions, Governor Jerry Brown announced the first ever statewide mandatory reduction in urban water use in April 2015. This calls on Californians

Written by Andrew Frederick Johnson, Postdoctoral Researcher of Marine Biology at Scripps Insitution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego | Print | Email

It was Charles Darwin, almost 200 years ago, who first asked how it could be that coral reefs could flourish in relatively barren parts of the Pacific Ocean. This conundrum subsequently became known as Darwin’s Paradox.

Written by Regan Early, Lecturer in Conservation Biology, University of Exeter | Print | Email

It’s mid-February and along Britain’s south coast gilt-head bream are drifting from the open sea into the estuaries. Meanwhile, thousands of little egrets are preparing to fly to continental Europe for breeding season, though a few hundred

We don’t have to know exactly how high the sea might rise to start doing something about it.Climate scientists have recently been outraged by job losses within CSIRO. Sixty climate jobs are likely to be lost.

Scientists believe they may have found how to safeguard a staple tropical crop, on which hundreds of millions of people depend, from the depredations of climate change. They have discovered − through conventional breeding rather than genetic modification − 30 new “lines” (varieties) of beans that will thrive in the higher temperatures expected later this century.

Florida is a coastal state. Nearly 80% of its 20 million residents live near the coast on land just a few feet above sea level, and over a hundred million tourists visit the beaches and stay in beach-front hotels every year.

Climate change is going to affect every city on the planet in some way—but not necessarily in the same way. For those cities already adapting to it, strong, decisive action may spell the difference between surviving global warming and succumbing to it. Five cities that are steeling themselves…and five that are fooling themselves.

In tropical developing countries, effective coastal management must acknowledge the widespread dependence of poor and politically weak communities on the use of fish for food. Acknowledging this dependence on artisanal fisheries is pivotal to reconciling the largely separate agendas for food security and biodiversity conservation.

I believe we have a problem — a big problem. According to demographers, by the end of this century we’ll have around 11 billion mouths to feed. Most of the additional 4 billion people alive then will be in developing nations.

I recently had the opportunity to engage in conversation with Guy McPherson about a number of topics and subsequently began reading his book Walking Away From Empire, Guy’s personal journey of leaving a tenured professorship to radically alter his living arrangements in preparation for the collapse of industrial civilization.

Dutch scientists have thought up a new use for all the carbon dioxide that pours from the chimneys of fossil fuel-burning power stations: harvest it for even more electricity. They could, they argue, pump the carbon dioxide through water or other liquids and produce a flow of electrons and therefore more electricity.

The world’s coral reefs are under threat. Some scientists say doses of cloud brightening could provide a solution to the problem. Here’s a new twist to the geoengineer’s dilemma: just change the climate locally – over the bit you want to protect – and leave the rest of the planet alone.

Trees may be getting more efficient in the way they manage water. They could be exploiting the higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, growing foliage from a lower uptake of groundwater. If so, then the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect – predicted by theorists and observed in laboratory experiments – could be real.

One of the great stumbling blocks of climate talks in the last 15 years has been that America refuses to move to cut emissions of greenhouse gases until China does – but at the weekend leaders of the world’s two great polluters reached agreement to phase out one of the most potent of them hydrofluorocarbons (HCFs).

As the carbon dioxide in the air hits 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, some are arguing that the best way address climate change is to use the controversial practice of geoengineering — the deliberate altering of the Earth’s ecological and climate systems to counter the effects of global warming.

Solar power is here to stay. So is efficiency and conservative use of electricity. Solar power and local or community production is the best bet for combating global warming. Decentralized and personal production gives home owners and business managers a stake in production and thus conservation.

While many of us are bemoaning the fate of the planet, one man has actually gone out and experimented with solutions to the desertification taking place (grasslands drying out and turning into desert areas) and he has found a solution that works...

Something interesting is happening in Australia. A new study by the research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance has found that unsubsidized renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels like coal and gas.